


Glow

by proprioception (sacrificethemtothesquid)



Series: Shrapnel [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, radiation poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 09:37:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11354775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/pseuds/proprioception
Summary: The worst hazard on the road is the one she can't even see.





	Glow

**Author's Note:**

> Because sometimes you finish a novel that’s been a constant presence in your head for two years and now suddenly, terrifyingly it _isn’t_ and to fill the gaping chasm of creative space you immediately panic and write an absurdly self-serving blurt of h/c.
> 
> Inspired by the [Goiania Incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident)

 

The station is barely worth the name, just a haphazard collection of what could charitably be called shacks. Despite this, it’s the only place for miles, and they’ve been on the road long enough that trade should never be passed up. They lie on their bellies on a nearby ridge, peering through the early morning haze. The car is tucked out of sight half a mile back.

“What do you think?” Furiosa asks.

Max grunts. It’s not a denial.

They go in, driving straight and slow.  

The town is a hairsbreadth from being dead. There aren’t any vehicles, nor any tracks in or out save their own. Sand is drifted up around the buildings, against doors that have obviously not been recently opened. There’s a butchered goanna drying on a wire between two of the houses, but even that looks stringy and thin. The only saving grace is the rusty water pump in the center of the village. Judging by the dark grease at its joints, miraculously, it might still be working.

She knows something’s wrong before they even get out of the car. Max is tracking something she can’t see, his eyes darting to something over her shoulder, in that corner, near this pile of crates. They’ve been travelling together long enough that she knows if there’s an issue, he’ll tell her, but he’s got an eerie sixth sense about these things, bordering on the preternatural, and she’s coming to understand that his flickers of insight presage danger more often than they don’t.

She doesn’t like it either; this place makes her skin crawl.

They trade anyway. The people aren’t in much better shape than the lizard. “Got water,” a woman offers. She’s got wild, swollen eyes and a thin cloth wrapped around her head. Her face is blistered with sunburn.  “Trade for food?”

Furiosa glances sidelong at Max, not enough to be obvious but just enough to catch the brief shake of his head in her peripheral vision. “Can’t spare the food, and we’re good on water,” she says calmly. “Looking for repair parts. We can offer a little ammo, some seeds-”

“Seeds?” The woman makes a face, revealing teeth that are cracked and black. “Waste of time, here.”

“You’ve got water, though,” Furiosa points out. “Is the soil that sour?”

“Doesn’t matter.” The woman makes a dismissive gesture. “All gon’ die before the green anyway. We’ll take the shotgun shells. Teep will show you parts.”

Furiosa haggles while Max inspects the assortment of scrap that a fragile ghost of a man brings together and unceremoniously dumps into a pile amid the circle of hovels. Most of it is unrecognizable. The woman isn’t a hard bargainer; she argues half-heartedly, and agrees to the second price Furiosa suggests. “Useless,” the woman says, pointing to a collection of salt-crusted parts in a bag. “If you take ‘em, we’ll throw in a water.”

It’s a unheard-of offer. She’s so taken aback her brain goes blank. She looks at Max; he squints, but doesn’t say no.

Back in the car, they drive. The silence is uncomfortable, Max hunched over the steering wheel and constantly looking in the rearview mirror. When the town has disappeared below the horizon, he turns them toward a nearby outcropping and parks in the shadows.

“Raiders?” she asks.

“Scrub up,” he directs, and kneels down to furiously rub sand on his hands. At her expression, he gestures impatiently.

“They weren’t sick,” she protests, but the look in his eyes is irrefutable, so she drops to her knees anyway. She’s been through plague towns often enough that she knows the symptoms: the oozing sores, the hacking coughs or the sharp smell of loose feces. The place felt odd, the trade downright weird, but she hadn’t seen anything obviously threatening.  

Still, she supports him when he’s in these moods, makes herself a bulwark against the world, because when it’s her own ghosts that come seeping up, he returns the favor.

It hits later that afternoon. Max has been increasingly irritable and twitchy without giving any hint as to _why_ , snorting and fussing about her feet on the dash, the placement of this gun, the angle of that mirror, and although she’s usually sympathetic to his moments of madness, this isn’t Max and his ghosts, this is Max being an _asshole_. They’ve even had what could accurately be described as a full-on fight, conducted entirely by exchanging glances: the glowering build-up, furious middle and resentful end are completely wordless, but she still feels the tension like a hot firewall between them.

Frankly, if he’s going to be this way, she doesn’t want to talk to him _either_.

She’s mentally cataloguing all the ways he pisses her off when he suddenly slams on the brakes. It’s only by the miracle of her quick reflexes that she doesn’t get a faceful of dashboard. As near as she can tell, there’s nothing - nothing on the horizon, nothing in the sky, not even a fucking cloud or bush or large _rock_ \- and she’s about to _really_ lay into him when he flings open the door and all but falls out in a panicked rush to vomit by the rear tire. She’s out of the car right behind him.

 _Fuck_ , she’s still mad, but she can’t yell at him when he’s heaving up his guts into the dirt.

When he regains his breath, he flaps a hand at her. “The parts,” he gasps. “Don’t... _don’t_ touch. But get...get them _out_.” And then he’s caught in another paroxysm of painful retching.

Her anger instantly evaporates.

She’s not sure what to do, exactly, because it doesn’t make _sense_ , but his direction is clear. The parts are in a bundle behind his seat, and for lack of a better idea, she ends up snagging the binding with the tip of her rifle, and flinging the offending package as far away from the car as she can.

“ _Further_ ,” Max wheezes.

She snags and flings it again, until he jerks a single nod and ducks back against the tire.

She fills a waterskin from their tanks - not the free water they’d gotten with the parts, because as far as Furiosa is concerned, it’s going straight into the radiator - and sets it next to him before moving away. As he pukes, she lets him have his space; all the times she’s gotten a piece of bad jerky, that’s what she’s wanted, to just purge in peace and let her body handle it.

So - she sits. She counts bullets and matches them to guns, trying to decide if she feels nauseous too, or if her stomach is just roiling in sympathy. They’ve eaten the same food; there’s still some rations from the Citadel hidden away, but they’re trying to stretch those for as long as they can, choosing instead to hunt the lizards and rabbits that come out at dusk. If anything, it’s their water: they’d filled their tanks at a town three days past, and it had _tasted_ okay - as clean as the Citadel’s even - but she knows that some illnesses lurk undetectable until the moment they hit.

She’s pretty sure she’s had more of the water, though. Max is like a camel even at his thirstiest. If he’s feeling it, she should _definitely_ be feeling it, but aside from a vague queasiness, there’s nothing.

When she runs out of bullets, she cleans her rifle. And then her pistol. And then his shotgun, for good measure, even though it doesn’t really need it, even though he’s incredibly picky about other people handling it, and if he was paying attention, he’d be pissed.

It’s her petty revenge for him not talking all afternoon. She even oils the stock, just to make it obvious that she’s cleaned it.

When he finally goes quiet, she gets out and circles back around to where he’s collapsed against the bumper, pale and sweating. She soaks her scarf in water and gently drapes it around his neck before sliding down next to him. “Hey.”

He rolls his eyes toward her and almost makes a noise.

“You all right?”

“Should move,” he croaks out. The sun’s close to the horizon, and they’re completely exposed. There’s enough of a moon they might be able to see any oncoming threat, but it’s high in the sky and won’t last the full night.

“I could drive.” He’s as protective of the car as he is of his guns, and it’s been an occasional source of friction on the road. This time, he just manages a single exhausted nod and leans hard on her as they get to their feet.

He can barely walk as she bundles him into the passenger side, and as soon as he’s sitting, he leans out the door to puke again, and would have pitched face-first into the sand if she wasn't hanging on to his shoulder in her abrupt dance to to avoid vomit on her boots.

“ _You_ ,” he manages, between shudders. “...okay?”

There’s a headache settling behind her eyes, and a dull, watery feeling in her bowels, but otherwise, she thinks she’s bypassing whatever this is. “The parts,” she says. “Why?”

He shakes his head. “...think they’re -” another hard, choking clench- “... _hot_.”

She frowns. Fallout is something she only has a vague sense of; it can’t be seen or tasted or felt, but it ruins salvage and brings a wasting sickness in its dust. She’s heard stories in Bartertown of things brought in from the hot zones, but as far as she knows, those regions are far to the south and east. “It’s bad water, it’s got to be-”

He makes an incomprehensible noise, and fumbles for the glove box, missing badly and almost tumbling out of the car again. Bracing him with one arm, she pops the glove box open and digs through the loose cartridge casings and little bundles of wire until she unearths some kind of tool. It’s haphazardly put together, what might be a distributor welded to an unrecognizable collection of parts.

His fingers close around it, poking for some unknowable switch until the whole thing makes a small ozone pop. “Go,” he mutters, pushing the thing at her. “Just...point it.”

It’s a detector. It looks homemade, utterly unlike the priceless, boxy devices that Joe had hoarded at the Citadel. Hefting it in one hand, she bumps the car door with her hip until it’s closed just enough to keep him from falling on his face, and sets off toward the offending bundle of parts a few paces away. “ _Don’t!_ ” he calls after her hoarsely. “Not too... _hrg_ ...not too _close_.”

Gingerly, she holds the detector at arm’s length, and edges toward the bundle. She’s not far, but the detector snaps to life with a hard, electric crunch that is such a loud shock she almost drops it, and it doesn’t stop crackling. “ _Back_ ,” Max gasps, and he’s halfway to her before his legs get tangled up and he hits the dirt.

She doesn’t know a single fucking thing about radiation poisoning, but the detector is making a terrifying amount of noise, and _Max_ has become suddenly, alarmingly sick.

Her throat abruptly clamps closed, and for several pounding heartbeats, she thinks she might pass out.

When she can feel her limbs again, she mechanically hauls him back into the car. He’s sweating and unsteady and _way_ too warm, but he’s shivering like it’s the middle of a winter desert night. Balancing him with one  arm, she pulls one of the thick Vuvalini blankets from the back and wraps it around his shoulders. She squats in front of him; he drools between her knees.

“Tell me what to do.” She doesn’t have any reference for this. She can field-dress a wound and shatter a man’s skull and take down a rider at a two hundred paces. He, at least, recognizes what’s going on. She’d have driven a thousand miles with the parts behind the seat, and she has no idea what that would have done.

“Hours?” he croaks. She frowns. He tries again. “...since the place?”

“A few?” It’s dusk, but it’s Wasteland summer and the sun lingers. “We left after midday.”

He heaves a sigh that may actually be relief. “‘S good.”

“ _Good?_ ”

He makes a vague motion with one hand. “Longer, ‘s good. Comes on quick…’s worse.”

She doesn’t understand, but he’s struggling to even stay upright, and talking is not making the situation better. “What do you need?”

“Water,” he says, and she gets it, and then, “...time.”

Time? What does he mean, time? Time to get better?

She is _not_ going to consider the alternative.

Her first instinct is to hit her redline back to the Citadel, but they’ve been driving for almost forty days now, zigzagging across the Waste as need and interest draw them. She doesn’t have a clear idea of how long it would take to get back, and there’s enough hostile territory between here and there that even if they had the fuel to make a straight run, she’d need someone riding shotgun to keep an eye on the horizon.

Whatever this is, they’re going to have to weather it on their own. For the first time since they left, she feels the absence of support keenly.  

He drinks a little, and it comes back up almost immediately. He’s in no shape to be a passenger, much less hold a gun, so she makes the executive decision that cover be damned, they’re camping here for the night. By the time the first stars come out, he’s settled a little, miserably curled up in the passenger seat. She props open the door with a gascan so it’s open if he needs it but won’t slam shut in the wind, tucks another blanket around him, and climbs up on the roof with her rifle to keep watch.

The desert at dusk is empty, a flat, blank expanse of red dirt and low scrub. A dark movement near the north catches her eye, but when she lifts her scope, it’s just a pack of feral camels, slowly ambling toward an unknown oasis. The sun’s been down for hours, but even on the roof of the car, she can still feel the day’s heat radiating from the earth.

The parts are hot. She’s not even sure what that means, only that they’re poison. She doesn’t know how. Max barely touched them - he’d carried them in a bag, he hadn’t even touched them with bare skin - and now he’s sick. Furiosa didn’t touch them, and she’s not entirely sure the unease in her gut is just the situation.

The woman at the station had known, she must have; there’s a hot blaze of fury at the realization. She’d _given_ them, and there hadn’t been anyone else in the town -

She’s going to kill them. She’s going to kill every single one of them, the woman with the wild eyes and the skeletal man who showed them the parts. She’s going to burn everything that will burn and raze the entire fucking village to the ground-

She can’t drive because Max still has his head hanging out the door, and she absolutely can’t leave him here.

The helplessness of it all burns in her throat.

She’s not a healer. She never has been. If Mari or Cheedo were here, they’d know what to do, but Mari is gone and Cheedo is back at the Citadel, and it’s only Furiosa, formerly the Imperator known as the Bag of Nails, feared in three towns. Her hands have taken far more lives than they’ve saved. What she can do right now is _nothing_.

She thinks of the half-life War Boys, of the ones who didn’t die historic, the ones who wasted away under the dispassionate eye of the Organic Mechanic. They’d had the night sweats, the tumors -

She’s wobbling around on bad alignment, and every moment she follows this trail of thought is one more closer to a crash she’s not sure she’d survive.

Sitting is not helping. In a fit of irritation, she jumps down from the roof and slings her rifle across her back, stalking around the car. She’s buzzing with nervous energy, her whole body humming like a poorly-tuned engine. Everything is out of sync, her pistons, her gears, her tires.

From the passenger seat, Max makes a small noise, and she stops her patrol to slide across the driver’s seat, leaning against him over the gearshift. He’s a blaze of heat through the blanket, but still shaking. “What do you need?” she asks quietly. “What can I do?”

“You,” he croaks. “You’re okay?”

“I think so.” The scarf is still around his neck, drenched in sweat and no comfort at all, so she gently takes it off and pours a little more of their precious water on it. The water’s not really any cooler than he is, but he still makes an indecent sound of relief when the scarf hits his skin.

His lips quirk in what might be a smile. “...got lucky, then.”

She knows what kind of luck she has. “When this is over, you’re explaining this to me,” she says, raising an eyebrow.

He frowns, considering, and then seems to come to some opaque conclusion. “Further east,” he finally says, like that’s the reason for everything.

He seems a little more lucid than earlier, so she pushes. “Do _we_ go further east? What’s east?”

The words roll around in his mouth before he can say them. “...’s more hot.”

“Why?”

He shrugs, a small movement absorbed by a wracking shudder. “Cities,” he supplies. “More cities. Got hit worse. Out west...less. Just waste.”

They’ve been sleeping together for four hundred days, but moments like these, the notion of how little she actually knows about him feels huge and looming. It's an insurmountable wall of mountains that even with his help, she’s not sure she will ever cross. Age is a relative thing out in the waste, but she’d bet water they were within a thousand days of each other; still, she’s stymied by the way he talks about Before like it’s a memory, as if the events of two generations past are something he was present to see.

Even if he could talk about it, she’s not even sure what questions she would ask. She wouldn’t even know where to start.

“You’re sure?” He’s twisting around in the seat with difficulty. He’s aiming his forehead at hers, but his head lands on her shoulder instead, and she curls her human hand around him. His face burns beneath her palm. “You’re okay?”

“I’d tell you if I wasn’t.” He hums, not quite accusing, and she snorts. “I _would_.” There’s no sense in lying to him, not after all this time. Not when some fraction of his blood still flows in her veins.

(It’s doesn’t, not really. She’d said something once and Cheedo corrected her, but Furiosa doesn’t think it matters. Even if the fluid he gave her has long been recycled by her body’s mysterious process, the essence is still there. She knows. She can feel it.)

“‘S important,” he mumbles.

“Look at me,” she says quietly. “Do I look sick?”

The moon’s still out, but just barely, a fat milky disc sliding toward the desert. He squints in its wan light. “... _beautiful_ ,” he finally decides, and _fuck_ , this man makes her feel like an over-pressure tire, her chest so full it could burst.

They stay wedged together over the gearshift until the moon sets, leaving only the harsh points of the stars and the faint red glow of the southern aurora flickering in the distance.

Mari had once called them bush-fires of the spirit world. “Solar radiation,” Amy scoffed. “Just the earth defending herself from the sun.”

Furiosa is not taken by omens, but it still makes her uneasy.

Tucked under her chin, Max seems to have finally dropped into a twitching, fitful sleep. She should be up top keeping watch, but it feels much more important to listen to his breath, to feel his pulse under her palm. The weight of the entire world is heavy in her arms.

If he were bleeding, she’d know what to do. Bad food, bad water - it’s all dangerous, it all has the potential to end them. They both know that. They are lone travellers in a violent world, far from their allies and surrounded by forces and tribes that are more likely to be hostile than indifferent.

It’s part of the thrill, that bone-deep knowledge that any day could be their last. It makes the freedom sweeter, the fucking like glowing metal coming together in a white-hot weld. The roar of the engine announces their presence as much as it announces their power. It makes her blood sing in her veins.

That is the risk; this is the consequence.

Limits frustrate her. She chafes against what she can’t control. They can defend against raiders, him behind the wheel and her with her rifle. They can be careful with their food and their water. They can avoid the worst terrain, and they can hide beneath thick canvas when the wind kicks the dust into a painful, scouring cloud. This? She can’t see it. It’s fast and it’s harsh and she has utterly no idea how he figured it out in the first place.

Unless he’s been poisoned before, and he recognized it.

It makes sense. It also makes her feel worse.

The sun’s still hours away, but the sky’s started to pale when she needs to move. She has to piss, and her human arm is completely numb in a way that jars loose memories of fire and pain and a frantic attempt to escape. She swallows back a shudder and gently rolls Max back into the seat. He mumbles a little, but doesn’t really wake, and she tucks the blanket more tightly around him.

Her entire body is stiff from hours wedged over the gearstick, so she walks a slow patrol around the car, the rifle a comfortable weight at her back. She hates sleeping in her prosthesis, hates the way it tweaks her shoulders and leaves hard lines in her skin, but she’s too wary to take it off; the last time she’d been caught unawares, she’d gotten lucky.

Next time, there won’t be another Max to come staggering around the shadow of the War Rig.

By sunrise, the desert is already shimmering with heat. She’s stripped down to her trousers and light undershirt, and is perched on the back of the car, staring at the bundle of parts fifty paces off. It’s such a small thing, barely a decent armload; he’d balanced it in the crook of his elbow without trouble. Taking it with them is out of the question, but she feels conflicted about just leaving it. It might lie untouched for hundreds of days, suffering weather and sand and whatever animals come to investigate, but eventually, someone else, some random scavenger, is going to come across it and get as sick as Max is now. She’d move it - she’d dig a hole and bury it - but frankly, she’s afraid to go near it.

It’s the harsh calculus of the wasteland, and she will always, _always_ put Max’s life above a stranger’s.

Max wakes up and drinks a little water, and she has about ten minutes of good, solid hope that he’s getting better before his body decisively rejects it. It’s been over half a day since he’s been able to keep anything down, and dehydration is a very real threat. “We have to go,” she finally says. They’re out in the open, and while the darkness might have helped them hide, the noonday sun is a danger all its own.

“Drive,” he agrees, and then they’re flying across the waste. There was a rock formation they’d passed the afternoon before, about an hour before he’d gotten sick. It’ll provide shade and shelter, and a place to regroup.

She still has very solid plans to go back and burn the town to ash, and backtracking will only help.

It’s a rough, miserable ride. He doesn’t have anything left to throw up, but the movement of the car is clearly not helping, and she fangs it in the hope of minimizing his pain.

The rock formation rises like a myth out of the scrub, the only feature for miles. When they get there, she eases the car under a low overhang. It’s a perfect hiding place, and the smattering of faded graffiti and a handful of abandoned cans indicate that someone else thought so too, although based on the weathering and lack of tracks, whoever was here abandoned it long ago.

He’s still shivering, but there’s too much color in his cheeks, so she hauls him out of the car and onto a blanket she’s spread in the shade. He fights a little as she strips off his jacket and boots, but leans gratefully into the cloth as she starts sponging him down. “How long does this last?” she asks quietly. “Do you know?”

He shakes his head. He’s out of it enough that she’s not even sure he knows where he is.

The bath seems to help. His color goes back to something approaching normal, but her heart clenches as she moves the cloth over his shoulders, across the thick muscles of his torso. There’s a bright rash spreading along his stomach and arm - exactly like a burn from the offending bag, a burn caused by something that wasn’t on fire, something he didn’t even _feel_.

She grits her teeth against a hard stab of protective anger. She has no claim on him, she _knows_ that. It’s not how their relationship works, but the deepest parts of her animal brain disagree: she’s the one learning his skin, the one who traces every scar with her mouth and tastes the map of his body. She doesn’t own him, but there is a glowing possession in knowledge.  

She is going to _destroy_ that town.

She hasn’t slept, and although they’re still vulnerable, the heat of the afternoon is a physical force. She gets him more water that he doesn’t drink, and leans up against the rock, his head tucked against her thigh. She _means_ to stay awake, to keep one eye open, but as soon as she’s settled in the shade, she’s out.

She wakes up with a jerk, the phantom sensation of blood on her hands oily and thick. The sun is lower in the sky, but it’s still fucking _hot_ , the desert a red, shimmering haze, and as she claws her way out of the nightmare, for a moment she almost believes she’s actually on fire.

The panic spikes harder when she realizes Max isn’t there.

He hasn’t gone far, just leaning on the side of the car where he’s squinting at the horizon and swaying a little. Her breath is caught in her throat, and it’s way too _warm_ , and when she shoves herself to her feet it’s too fast, and she has to sink back down before she collapses entirely.

He stares at her, transfixed and alarmed.

“I _thought-_ ” but her throat’s closing up and there’s _pain_ in her missing hand, wild and sharp like she hasn’t felt in a thousand days. It radiates up her arm and across her shoulder, and she fumbles with the straps of her prosthesis, clawing it off as if it’s on fire itself. She clenches fingers that don’t exist, tries to work a wrist that’s no longer there, but missing muscles seize like an engine, brittle metal formed out of phantom flesh, and she can only curl around it and try to breathe.

He almost falls in his rush to get to her.

They sit, Max propped up against the rock flushed and vague, Furiosa hunched over her stump and shaking. It hasn’t happened in a long time, not like this, and beyond the immediate pain there’s a bright ring of inexplicable embarrassment, like a halo around a winter sun.

“Hey,” he finally says, in the same voice he’d use to calm a startled camel, almost too soft to hear. “Let me?”

There’s nothing to see, but he still takes her stump in his hands, running clammy fingers over her skin, and she realizes he’s looking for burns. “It’s just a dream,” she says. “I didn’t touch it. I didn’t-”

“Sat in the car,” he mutters. “Sat with it _right there_.” He lifts his face and his expression is tortured, scorching. “Anything,” he says, “nausea, dizziness...anything?”

She thinks back to yesterday, of the way her stomach churned. She still feels shaky and empty, but that could be the nightmare, or the fact she’s probably forgotten to eat. “A little?”

“I’m _sorry_ .” The words come like they’ve been punched out of him, like the sudden collapse of a dune. “I’m so sorry - should have _seen_ , should have-”

“ _I’m_ sorry,” she says fiercely. “Something was off, something was _off_ . They _knew-_ ”

He nods once, miserably. He’d felt it too, and she’d _seen_ him feel it, and they’d both ignored the warnings in their bones. Now he’s paying for it.

“How long?” she asks again.

Max shrugs, eyes half-lidded. “A day?”

“This has happened before.”

“Once.” He chews on the recollection. “Bad water...knew it was hot, chose to drink anyway.”

Furiosa suspects it wasn’t much of a choice, not out in the desert.

“There’s stories about it in Bartertown,” she confesses, “but I haven’t - not personally, anyway, just second-hand information-”

“Citadel’s clean,” he agrees. His eyes flick up at her. “Lucky, that.”

She’d wanted the freedom - they both did - but now part of her wishes they’d never left.

“Are you...half-life?” The question comes out before she can stop it, a hard, choking ache in her chest at the asking, but they’re alone in the waste, and if he’s going to die, she needs to know. She needs to be pragmatic, to make plans even if the very thought feels worse than the bright, shivering pain in her stump.  

_We keep moving._

“Wasn’t this bad, before.” It’s not an answer.

She is suddenly, utterly, overwhelmingly scared. Four hundred days he’s been closer than her own sweat, and two hundred days before that he’d stepped out from behind the War Rig to embed himself in her skin. She’s known his absence like the loss of her arm, but he’d come back, _he always comes back_ , and if he slips away right in front of her-

She wonders if this is how he felt when she’d gone to the Bullet Farm, when she’d gone in alone, unarmed, and made him watch. It’s a raw, howling thing that goes deeper than panic, boiling up from her marrow like a wild burst of burning guzzoline.

“Hey,” he murmurs, and she presses her face against his neck, her mouth automatically searching out his pulse. He’s damp and too warm, but the familiar rhythm is strong against her lips. “Won’t make a promise I can’t keep,” he adds quietly.

Somehow, that’s more comforting that it should be.

“How do you know these things?” she asks.

“Read it,” he says, then, more quietly: “ _Had_ to, once.”

In his voice, she hears the echoes of the ghosts he doesn’t mention. They shape him like dripping water shapes a cave, and she can never decide whether to be envious or grateful for their presence. “You should try and drink some,” she says instead.

He tries, but can’t hold more than a few sips.

The sun sinks behind them, the shadows stretching out purple and deep. He dozes, undone from his brief walk. She should patrol, she should check their water and their food and their guns, but she can’t make herself move.

He’d said a day, but by nightfall, it’s been more than that, and he’s still sunk back into the blankets, shivering and wretched. It’s far from chilly, but she curls around him anyway, pressing her body against his as if they were two lizards in a hole. They sleep outside the car when they can, but it’s usually when they’re sure they’ll hear any threat before it gets too close. She loves those nights, those long, lazy afternoons where they sprawl languid on the blankets and escape the desert heat by making heat of their own.

She presses her lips to the brand on his neck.

Around midnight, he wakes up and tentatively thinks he might be hungry. She’s bleary-eyed but fiercely hopeful, but the jerky she soaks in water doesn’t last. She holds him up as he shudders, and feels the agonized frustration in his body as savagely as her own. When he’s wrung as empty and dry as a withered waterskin, he falls back against her, boneless, exhausted.

She thinks she might actually shatter.

By the time the sun comes up, she has the car packed and ready. He isn’t sleeping, just buried in the blanket and staring at nothing. “We’re going,” she tells him, and bodily hauls him up into the passenger seat. The dehydration is setting in with a vengeance; he’s breathing like a crow, fast and shallow and without any awareness. She gets a little water into him, hardly more than a mouthful, and this time, it seems to stay.

She feels like the raw edge of a dust storm, picking up speed and intensity as she drives.

She doesn’t bother approaching the town with caution. She’s out of the car before the engine even stops, pumping the shotgun with her human hand as the door slams behind her. The voice that comes boiling up from the bottom of her lungs is one from a thousand days before, the bellowed command of an Imperator with absolute authority and no hesitation in exerting it: “Come out, _now!_ ”

There is utter silence.

“I am _not_ fucking around!” The white haze of fury surges through her veins, and with a roar, Furiosa puts her foot through the side of the nearest shack with a tremendous crash.

The wild-eyed woman is standing by the water pump, her expression vacant. “You again,” she says. “We’ve got water. Trade for food?”

The ragged scarf is gone from her head, revealing a patchy, peeling scalp.

Furiosa stalks over, primed for violence and half a breath from murder. “The parts,” she snaps. “The ones you gave us. Where’d they come from.”

The woman shakes her head. “Traveller came through. Died over there.” She points to one of the abandoned houses. “Cursed it. Those that took him in, dead. Us, gonna follow. All sick.”

“How sick,” Furiosa grits out.

The woman shrugs, a half-mad grin twisting her lips. “Bad curse. You took it. You know.”

Max is in the car curled up in a miserable ball, Max is _dying_ , and her heart is a cracked engine blazing in her chest. She raises the shotgun to the woman’s forehead in one smooth movement. “Tell. Me. Now.”

The woman rolls her eyes. “Gun’s not gonna solve me, not unless it puts me out before the sweats do.”

She thinks of Max, of his clammy skin and shaking hands, and shoves the barrel against the woman’s skull.  

“Right! Right!” The woman holds up her hands. “First day, puking. Second day, same. Third, same. Four, might get better. Fifth, up and walking.” She points at her own head. “Maybe hair goes. Maybe not. You got ten days, twenty - nobody knows. One day, you wake up and you shit and you die.” She rolls her eyes up to the barrel of the pistol, thoroughly unimpressed. “I got two days, maybe less. Teep, he’s already gone.”

Panic crystallizes like salt in her bowels, and Furiosa jiggles the shotgun. “Tell me _everything_.”

“Call it the Glow,” the woman says. “You see the Glow, you know you’re dead.” She shakes her head. “Had to see it myself. Couldn’t not.” She raises her eyes to Furiosa, and they’re wild and fever-bright. “So _beautiful_ , it is. And now I’m a ghost, but the glow...the beautiful blue glow…like the sky, but so bright...”

“A cure,” Furiosa rasps. “There has to be-”

The woman laughs. “No cure. Trader said there wasn’t.”

“Where’d he get it? Did he _say_ ?” Her pulse is pounding in her ears. She can’t lose Max. She _can’t_.

“Some place west.” The woman shakes her head. “Said he found it, some big shiny place from Before. Wouldn’t sell to us, but…” she wiggles the place where her eyebrows should be, “can’t say no now, can he.”

“The parts you sold us - I didn’t see a glow.” She doesn’t _think_ she did, but she has no context for this. It had been broad daylight, the sun high overhead. Even a cranklight would have been easy to miss-

“Think we’d _give_ you it?” The woman rears back her head and laughs, all cracked teeth and bleeding gums. “The Glow is ours. Those bits you took - that was the shell. That was the case. We took it out. We don’t need those bits. It’s _free_.”

Furiosa thinks of ribs cracked open, of a beating heart not meant to be exposed, glistening and quivering in the sharp air, and wonders the slowest way to make this woman die. “Where’d it come from?” she hears herself demand. “Where’d he _get_ it?”

The woman rolls her eyes. “West,” she snaps. “I said. He said he was going south, try and sell it to some that wanted it.”

“Who would _buy_ such a thing?”

The woman coughs and spits a bloody wad into the dust. “Said there’s a market for such things. Things from Before: shiny, hard, cursed. Said if anything falls from the sky on our heads, they’d buy it.”

 _Satellites._ There’s a sudden hitch in her chest, a sharp stab of hope . They’ve been driving around for forty days hunting for any scrap of information, and here it’s fallen right into their laps, but _oh_ , is it worth the price?

“How far south?” Furiosa demands. “How _far_?”

“Don’t _know_ ,” the woman snaps back. “Ten days, maybe. He didn’t have water for more than that.”

“The Glow - where is it now?”

“Hidden.” The woman sneers. “Thought you might come back. Thought you might take it. It’s somewhere safe, somewhere nobody’s gonna find it.”

“Good,” says Furiosa, and pulls the trigger.

It’s not a wise use of hard-won guzzoline, but she pours it out anyway. The town burns just like she’d imagined, hot and hard and satisfying.

She doesn’t stay to see the ashes. She drops the gearshift from third straight into fifth, and roars away across the waste.

The engine overheats in the late afternoon. She makes it to a scraggly patch of trees, scoured dead and bare by dust and wind, just as it sputters to a halt.

She’s under the hood, dribbling water on the engine block, when he says, out of nowhere, “...what’d you _do_ to my _car_.”

She’s jumps so hard she drops the bottle, and the fragile plastic explodes in a huge cloud of steam, knocking the hood off its rod with a tremendous crash. She’s got her pistol up before it registers - Max. It’s _Max._ He’s standing there, a little unsteady, a _lot_ startled, but more clear-eyed than he’s been in days.

He raises his eyebrows at the gun.

He’s pale, he’s shaky and drained in a way that makes her stomach clench, but he’s there, he’s _there_ , he’s standing and staring, and he looks _awake_ -

“Drink something,” she chokes out, because it’s the first thing that pops into her head. “ _Now_. Do it.”

“Did,” he says, and gestures to the car.

“ _Again_ ,” she snaps, and he reaches into the window to grab his canteen. She watches as he takes a few short, careful swallows, and it’s the most gorgeous sight she’s ever seen. She’s seen him naked, seen him above and below her, seen him unravelled by her own five fingers, but she has _never_ felt as wild and enraptured as she does right now.

There’s water glistening in the stubble above his lip, and she’s riding the hard edge of hysteria. The relief expands in her lungs like a bubble of choking gas, and then he’s saying, “Hey... _hey_ ,” and her face is pressed into his neck, into the stale, damp, _utterly beloved_ scent of him, and she draws in one long shaky breath like the addict she is, and can’t stop.

“Don’t,” is all she can gasp out. “Don’t. Don’t _ever-_ ”

“No,” he agrees, and he’s clinging to her like the time out on the road when he’d handed her a gun and she’d chosen to live.

She feels like that now, sick with relief and as brittle as an overbent strut. She hadn’t known the weight she was carrying until this moment, and it’s all crashing down at once.

When she can, she pushes herself back, human hand fisted hard in his shirt. “You,” she manages. “How-”

“ _Tired_ ,” he says, and she realizes how badly they’re both trembling.  

It’s suddenly all she can do to pull the bedrolls out and drop them into the car’s narrow shadow. They’re exposed and steaming, the afternoon heat an oppressive layer of menace bearing down on top of them. She should keep going, she should cool the engine and take them somewhere safe, but her limbs are impossibly heavy, and as soon as the blankets are on the ground, she and Max both drop. “Drink,” she orders roughly, and he does.

Despite the heat, she curls around him, fingers clenched in his hair as he presses his head against her chest. “Is this- does this mean...?” She can’t finish, terrified of asking and more terrified of the answer.

He’s quiet a long time, his breathing deep and even, and she thinks he’s fallen asleep. “Things I read,” he finally says. “‘S okay now. In a month, maybe not. Have to watch.”

“Before?” she asks, her pulse pounding in the meat of her tongue. “What happened before?”

She feels him shrug. “Nothing,” he says. “Just...nothing. Was tired, that's all."

“You’re all right?” She has to hear him say it, needs to hear it more than anything she’s ever needed in her life.

He hums against her breastbone.

The last three days of bad sleep and grinding stress are smoldering in her muscles. He’s okay. He’s okay right now. Later - she can’t think about later. All that matters is that he’s right here, right now, as warm as the desert sun and as solid as the iron in her engine.

****

They sleep. It’s long after dark when she wakes up, a dreamless lassitude clinging to her skin. He’s sitting up, tentatively spooning Citadel soup out of a can. Wordlessly, he offers her a mouthful as she’s scrubbing the grit from her face. She takes it, and it tastes like grains and herbs and _home_ , and she leans against his shoulder as her eyes burn.

“Thanks,” he mumbles around a bite of soup. “I, mmm. I just.”

She can’t say that she thought she’d stop breathing. “I’ve got a lead on the satellites,” she offers instead. He doesn’t ask about the village, and she doesn’t offer, although she can still smell the smoke on her skin, and she’s sure he can too.

He raises an eyebrow.

“Ten days south.” They’ve got enough guzzoline, they can make it maybe halfway before needing more. They’ve got enough water they can trade, and Dag’s seeds.

He hums, noncommital.

He finished the soup, and she chews on some jerky, and she makes sure he drinks another full canteen. They lay back down, face to face, and he brushes the short curls away from her face. She doesn’t realize she’s crying until his fingers come away wet.  “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m so sorry.”

She swallows up his words in her mouth, and then they curl up like lizards. The desert is wide and open, and tomorrow they’ll drive, but for now, she puts her ear to his chest and falls into the steady, faithful pulse of his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: Because I am a horrible person, have a [sequel.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11502459)


End file.
